In the midst of your morning routine, you can probably lay out a number of situations in which you reach into your pocket to pay people or vendors for services/products provided. I would imagine that many reading this blog pay for a daily coffee and newspaper, perhaps a periodic shoe shine, a highway toll, or train and bus fare.

In addition to these fees, how do you feel about reaching into your pocket on a daily basis to pay a surcharge to support banking institutions on Wall Street that are deemed ‘too big to fail?’ How does that feel? Not very good, does it? I did not think so.

Yet, make no mistake, that daily banking toll you pay, and the subsidy the banks receive, are very much a reality in America circa 2014. (more…)

I thank Bill Cohan, Carol Massar, and those at Bloomberg for having me on the show Taking Stock yesterday afternoon to address my take on the recent guilty verdict handed down in the Madoff employees case, corruption within the financial-political-regulatory system, and recent developments within the executive offices at JP Morgan.

For those who have not yet read the book — I hope you will — but would like to know more specifically what I am referring to when I make the statement that we need to “expose the corruption,” I am speaking of the following all of which is voluminously detailed in the book: (more…)

If the guilty verdict rendered yesterday in the trial of Madoff employees qualifies as full and fair justice in our nation, then we need to rethink our justice system.

Now, do not get me wrong. I do not have any sympathy for the sorry looking lot of defendants found guilty yesterday. In my opinion, they deserve what they get and were likely integral in aiding and abetting the massive fraud perpetrated by the swindler Bernard Madoff.

Are we to think, though, that the decades long scam perpetrated by Bernie and his rag tag team began and ended strictly inside his offices?

At what point do we as a nation say ENOUGH to the lies and scandalous practices within and around Washington?

I am referring to the lies — and yes, they are lies — that were put forth by the Attorney General’s office in the investigation of mortgage fraud. If you do not think Eric Holder, Lanny Breuer, and others intentionally misrepresented — er, lied — regarding the efforts of the DOJ to the American public, I beg to differ. (more…)

It seems only fitting that, with a surname like Doyle, on the 17th of March I should take a break from the daily navigation of the economic landscape, show off my ancestors’ breastplate, and spread a wee bit of Irish hopefulness to all who come here. On that note, I welcome sharing this Irish blessing:

Wishing you a rainbow
For sunlight after showers—
Miles and miles of Irish smiles
For golden happy hours—
Shamrocks at your doorway
For luck and laughter too,
And a host of friends that never ends
Each day your whole life through!

With best wishes and Godspeed, I also hope people might take just a few minutes to enjoy this Irish classic:

Do you get annoyed by telemarketing calls coming into your home at all hours? Imagine, instead of a pitchman for just another product you would never need, that the individual on the other end of the line is your US Congressman. Ridiculous? Think again.

Have we sunk so low that our elected officials now spend endless hours literally ‘dialing for dollars’? Indeed they do.

Represent.Us, a grassroots organization you will hear a lot more of in the coming years, highlights a brief 3-minute clip so we can watch and learn as Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School and highly acclaimed political activist, spoke on just such a topic with Bill Moyers:

When people knowingly misrepresent critically important information to you and do so on a repeated basis, why would you ever trust them?

Human nature being what it is, you would not.

That is exactly the quandary the Department of Justice finds itself in currently. How so? Let’s navigate and review a recently released report from none other than the Inspector General’s Office of the Department of Justice which outlines how the DOJ repeatedly delivered grossly exaggerated information to the American public regarding mortgage fraud investigations. (more…)

Every now and then there are selected commentaries brought to my attention that just scream, “SHARE THIS!” To that end, I thank the reader who sent along the following article with voluminous links.

Think our society is not in distress and decline? I compel you to take a few minutes to review a listing of 55 items compiled by Michael Snyder of The American Dream. Please let me know which of these items most disturb you and what you think of the “state of our union.” Let’s navigate.

#1 We are supposed to have a government “of the people, by the people, for the people”, but only 25 percent of all Americans know how long U.S. Senators are elected for (6 years), and only 20 percent of all Americans know how many U.S. senators there are. (more…)